Wednesday, October 15, 2008

microblogging

It seems I have happily embraced twitter, which seems to be the defacto brand name of microblogging, at least in my peer group. I've been using it for a while and it's all well and good. I've even added the facebook app that pulls my "status" from it, which is really convenient because it seems that many of my friends regularly check those status messages there.

Recently, I noticed that one friend has his myspace status syndicated as well. Wanting the same, I inquired of his method. A service called Ping.fm is the source, offering syndication to just about any site you could possibly imagine sending a status or microblog to. The problem is that Ping.fm needs to be the source of the content. (unless you use a program like spaz for your posting, which has options to export to ping.fm.

I personally prefer twitter as a front end, because I regularly watch and make posts on the actual twitter site, as well as the twitter client on my iPhone. Ping.fm doesn't want to allow other services as a content source because it opens the door for people to get stuck in endless loops. (I personally think this is bunk. All it would take to fix this is have the xml parser look for the same tweet more than twice in a row, and if it occurs, turn off the forward and send an email to the user)

Apparently a third party is working on a plugin to do this, but who knows when that will happen. There's also apparently a way to route the RSS from my twitter page to an e-mail which can update Ping.fm, but I haven't figured out how to make that work yet. A third option would be for me to get off my duff and learn C so I could make a program to sit on the server and fetch the twitter RSS, then do the parsing and checking mentioned above before dumping it to Ping.fm.